The hypocrisy of the Mexican democracy

By Gabriel Infante Carrillo
Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Contribution

Mexican governments, authorities and politicians in general have been telling for years that Mexico is a democratic, institutional, rule of law and sovereign country, but when it comes to human rights issues it seems that Mexico is far beyond to become a true democratic state.


Mexican National Human Rights Commissions expensive and inefficient

In recent years, Mexican human rights have been put in doubt by several international ONG’s like Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, just to name a few. For instance Human Rights Watch have denounced and pointed out in several opportunities the inefficiency of the Mexican National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos) to solve and monitor cases that are in judicial process. One of the most recent reports of HRW on Mexico, pointed out that the limited impact and poor results of the Mexican commission of human rights is not due to the lack of budget, on the contrary, the commission's budget for the present year is of $78 millions US dollars and it has one thousands employees which makes it the largest institution of Human Rights of Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch, the commission has limited its duty on just documenting and identifying the abuses, but it hasn’t taken any action to generate changes on this matter.
On the other hand, the Mexican National Human Rights Commission has discredit Human Rights Watch Report, claiming that they have identified 48 “lies or errors”, which the international ONG consider that the negative reaction of the Mexican human rights commission towards the report, harms their own credibility.

In many of the cases documented by the Mexican Human Rights Commission they have not been resolved in favor of the victims or they just been filed and left behind. One of these cases is the murder of young women, mostly factory workers known as “maquiladoras” in the border city with the US, Ciudad Juárez. For more then a decade these crimes haven’t been resolved and the justice demanded by the relatives of the victims hasn’t arrived yet.
With the so call “War against the organize crime” implemented by the government of Felipe Calderon at the beginning of his administration. Its main purpose is to fight face to face the drug cartels, which in my opinion this hasn’t given any positive results, instead this has brought a noticeable increase of violence in the country, which is favorable to commit violations to human rights, which it has. The case of Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, indigenous woman of 73 years old died after four soldiers of the Mexican Army “presume” to have rape her in a small community of the Sierra de Zongolica in the state of Veracruz. The forensic report details that the woman died because of a skull fracture, internal hemorrhage and an anal bleed cause by a multiple penetration. After the occurred, at least three thousands inhabitant of the náhualt community where Ernestina was native, demanded to the governor of the state of Veracruz, Fidel Herrera Beltrán, to punish the responsibles of this crime and withdraw the military forces camped in different points of the Sierra de Zongolica. As it is typical the way justice is done in Mexico, the case was full of contradictions, corruptions and abused of power. At end the case was closed and the final verdict was that she wasn’t neither rape nor murder and her dead was due to a "parasite infection" that caused the pelvic bleeding, in spite of the conclusive evidences.

Mexico and the free press

Other human rights violations that has been increasing in Mexico for the past few years. This has to do with liberty of speech and free press, unfortunately the Mexican public opinion is not aware of the magnitude of this situation in spite that international ONG’s, like Reporters Without Borders has documented, monitored and denounced Mexican authorities to make justices on the aggressions and murders of journalists and put an end to this anti-democratic practice.

The reasons that the Mexican public opinion knows little about this situation, in my point of view, is that the media hasn’t given too much attention on this issue. Secondly there are few written press who has published extended reports and articles on this issue, but unfortunately Mexico is not a country of readers.

In the past two years Reporters Without Borders has classified Mexico as one of the most dangerous country for journalists follow by Iraq and just in Latin America, Mexico is in second last place follow by Cuba. This may sound exaggerated for many, but the ranking was determined by the number of aggressions, disappearances and murders of journalists. Many of these crimes are attribute to the drug cartels, but also by local state authorities and federal government officials.

At the end of Vincent Fox term in office, came out to the public spot light the case of Lydia Cacho, a journalist who was detain in Cancun and transfer to the state of Puebla in an inhuman way, violating all her individual rights. This was obviously an illegal detention, because this arrest was ordered by the governor of state of Puebla, Mario Marín, and Mexico, begin a Federal Republic, all thirty one states and a capital city are free and sovereign, which means no government officials from another state entity can detain someone on their territory. The detention was made as a result of the publication of Lydia Cacho’s book “ The Demons of Eden: The Power to Protect Child Pornography” On the text, the journalist mentions in several occasions the “prestigious” textile businessman of Lebanese origin, Kamel Nacif, who had links with a powerful prostitution and child pornography network, leaded by Jean Succar Kuri, a hotel businessman in Cancun. The conclusive evidence of the mistreat and illegal detention of the journalist was a telephone conversation between Kamel Nacif and the governor of the state of Puebla, and was broadcast on radio by the journalist, Carmen Aristegui, but the Supreme Court closed the case by considering these evidences insufficient.

A week ago, in the city of Culiacan, in the State of Sinaloa, three journalist of the local newspaper “El Debate” (The Debate) were attack by agents of the federal police (Polícia Federal Preventiva), while the journalists were covering one of many surveillance operations in the city since the “war against organize crime”, began. One of the journalists was tortured gunpoint and with raunchy language for several minutes. Once the journalist was held free, several units of the federal police besiege the newspaper headquarters for about an hour.

Another recent case was the murder of Teresa Bautista Merino and Felícista Martínez Sánchez, two indigenous journalists and radio presenter of a community radio station called “La voz que rompe el silencio” (The voice that break the silence), that occurred in the municipality of Putla de Guerrero in the state of Oaxaca on April 7th 2008. With this case it makes it evident the null disposition of the Mexican government to combat and put an end to the aggressions and crimes against the press and journalists. In the edition of May 4th 2008 of the weekly magazine “Proceso” the columnist and journalist Álvaro Delgado narrate a meeting that took place on April 21st 2008 between Aleida Calleja, vice-president of the World Association of Community Radio (AMARC) and Juan de Dios Castro Lozano, Federal Sub General Attorney of Human Right and Attention to victims, in which he declared Aleida Calleja “Enemy of State” in presence of international missions such as Reporters Without Borders, International Press Institute, Rory Peck Trust, Inter American Society of Press, the International Federation of Journalist, UNESCO and the International Media Support.

In the meeting the Federal Sub General Attorney discredit the two murder journalists, by saying that they weren’t even journalists that they were just housewife. According to Calleja and the information that AMRC has gathered, the two journalists were murder as result of denounces that they made of rape and aggressions toward women and also for talking about the municipality autonomy.

In the meeting the international mission also interrogated the Federal Sub Attorney about the general situation of the free press in Mexico, which he denied by saying that the situation isn’t that serious and he asked in a very hostile mood to Sahara de Jong, representative of the International Institute for the Security of the Press, if she has elements to assured that Mexico is one of the countries with mayor problems for the journalists and then he raised the question to the international mission about what they though about the free press in Cuba.

The actual situation on human rights in Mexico is really worrying and it seems that the “government transition” in the year 2000, from the Revolutionary Institutional Party regime, that lasted more then 70 years where the abuses on human rights was the order of the day — for instance the 1968 student revolt that turn out to be a massacre and the butcher shop of the government — to the National Action Party regime, it hasn’t really been much of a change.

As you can see, this article is a brief and general look on the actual panorama on human rights in Mexico. There are dozens of cases about human rights abuses that it’s impossible to mention them all in this article, but I hope the cases that I exposed help open up the eyes of the world and see that the Mexican democracy is just a great hypocrisy.

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